When My Mother Is Most Beautiful by Rebecca Suzuki, Hanging Loose Press, December 2023
Technically classified as a book of poetry, Rebecca Suzuki’s debut collection, When My Mother Is Most Beautiful, contains verse, prose, drama, and haibun, a form that combines prose and haiku. Across the delightful hybridity, the author achieves thematic cohesion through her enthusiastic embrace of multilingualism. From the first entry to the last, Suzuki demonstrates multilingualism’s ability to make more resonant questions of identity that, trapped within a single tongue, remain stifling. “When I was 産まれた,” reads the book’s opening line, followed by a footnote that states, simply, “born.” For Suzuki, who immigrated to Bayside, Queens, from Nagoya, Japan, when she was 9, being born was an event that took place—and takes place for the author still—in a combination of English and Japanese. By comparison, Suzuki’s description of New York pizza (“cheese oozing off the side with hot orange oil pooling at the top”) is decidedly monolingual. Meanwhile, the dialogue in that same entry—between the author-speaker, her mother, and her sister—appears in Japanese. What the three family members say amongst themselves is translated in footnotes.
For a reader who does not know Japanese, the entry, titled “early days,” presents a kind of inverse experience of Suzuki’s initial weeks in New York, which involved navigating a new cultural environment, plus the logistical challenges of trips to the welfare office and the Herculean task of finding an apartment. The pizza, despite its mouthwatering description, feels public facing and familiar; what’s said between family members, on the street and in the restaurant, feels private. In a painful but poignant possible coincidence, the pizzeria in which the mother and sisters land for their respite may have once belonged to Suzuki’s Jewish-American father. The family’s move to the United States follows his death—an event, no doubt tragic, that the author addresses mostly obliquely. With much more directness, Suzuki confronts her preoccupations with the well-being of her ancestors at large. In an entry titled “eggplant,” she lays her fear bare: “My biggest worry has come true. How do my ancestors get home?”
The titular eggplant, which is also depicted in evocative original artwork on the book’s cover, is also a horse. Suzuki introduces the eggplant horse, her most striking metaphor, in an early entry about Obon, Japan’s festival of the dead:
my aunt makes a horse out of a thin cucumber or eggplant by sticking disposable chopsticks into them as legs. We all walk to the beach with the horse. When we get there, we light incense and let the eggplant horse float away in the water. That is how the spirits travel back to heaven.
Note the absence of simile: the creature isn’t like a horse or intended to represent one. It is alive, moving, capable of transporting others. The eggplant horse doesn’t only cross between the world of the living and the world of the dead. It traverses borders between the United States and Japan, English and Japanese, meaning and word, word and image. Suzuki’s horse reminded me viscerally of a moment in The Magical Language of Others, by E.J. Koh. In that hybrid-genre, multilingual, translation-obsessed text, Koh, who longs for a pet parakeet and flight from loneliness and isolation, fashions a bird out of a plastic bag tied to a string. The make-shift kite soars: “So little labor could bring so great a reward,” she writes.
Suzuki’s horse became, for me, a metaphor for her poetic project. Language (not one language, but Suzuki’s fluid incorporation of multiple languages) is the horse that transports past pains and anxieties about the future into an expansive, poetic present. A theory called translanguaging that Suzuki encountered helps her push back against the idea that multilinguals such as herself carry different dialects around in distinct mental boxes. “There aren’t a hundred boxes in your brain—just one Language,” she writes. Translanguaging is liberating; shifts across languages (but within Language) happen in the present.
Also springing from the present is Suzuki’s relationship to the sensual: colors, sounds, the culinary and the equestrian, the arboreal and the botanical. 桜, or sakura, cherry blossoms, rivals the eggplant as Suzuki’s central metaphor. She was almost named Sakura, “the most important symbol in Japanese culture,” she explains. But her aunt, portrayed lovingly but in contradistinction to her more whimsical mother, argued against it: “桜 is beautiful, but it withers and dies in just a week.” Suzuki acknowledges the allure of physical beauty, but almost never without also alluding to its fleetingness.
The most overtly political section of Suzuki’s book is titled “Where Do I Begin?” In nine consecutive entries, she stitches together reflections on becoming American, the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings, the spike in hate crimes against Asians and Asian-Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic, mass shootings, cultural appropriation, colonial erasure, and the unbroken importance of the horse to Indigenous peoples of the Americas. While questions are asked, often rhetorically (“How long are we made to contemplate our identity? / How long are we made to contemplate our belonging? / How long are we made to contemplate our body?”; “If I write without centering whiteness, am I always writing fiction?”), it’s the arrangement of entries and their suggested connections that reverberate most provocatively. A kimono, which in an earlier entry is cast as more ceremonial, is reinterpreted when a jazz pianist at a bar in Brooklyn shares how she dresses in a kimono every single day. Pride, joy, and delightful mundanity—how they ought to be expressed, without apology and with no explanation due—are what is threatened, and what must be preserved, in the face of violence springing from imperialism, misogyny, and white supremacy. Is Suzuki a political poet? She is acutely attuned to intersections of various power dynamics. She does not shy away from the political, just as she doesn’t wince at mortality and inevitable decay.
In addition to being a poet and creative nonfiction writer, Suzuki is a literary translator from Japanese into English. Translator-ly observations bubble up throughout her book. She investigates idioms and etymologies, and how words contain parts of one another, but never all of one another, across languages. In an entry titled “Home is a Smell” that culminates in an all-five-senses evocation of yakitori sauce, Suzuki relates the indescribability of smell to the art of translating: “You cannot get to the actual thing … You can only describe around it by comparing it to other things.” Like Sawako Nakayasu’s poem-ifesto Say Translation Is Art, to which Suzuki refers admiringly, When My Mother Is Most Beautiful could also be filed under Translation Studies.
More surprising than Suzuki’s work as a translator is the presence, in her book, of a translation’s ghost. When My Mother Is Most Beautiful began as a hybrid work of literary translation and her own creative writing that she embarked upon while an MFA student at Queens College, where she is now a faculty member of the English Department, and where I first encountered her work as a student entering the program just as she was finishing. The version of her manuscript she submitted as her thesis combined her translations of diary entries by a prominent female Japanese author with original entries on language and identity that sprung up during the translation process. The paired entries—Suzuki’s translations and the related meditations that were fully her own—appeared side by side in elegant, footnoted columns. The manuscript won the 2022 Loose Translation Prize, which is jointly sponsored by Brooklyn’s Hanging Loose Press and Queens College.
Hanging Loose intended to publish the entire project, but the representatives of the Japanese author she had translated declined to grant English-language rights. Suzuki initially hypothesized, she told me, that they may have been scared off by her project’s experimental nature, and may have also been reluctant to work with the combination of a small press and an emerging translator. She suspected gatekeeping and took it personally, at first. But Suzuki’s feelings of anger and disappointment evolved into a critical consideration of publishing industry practices that allow some literary translations to move forward while holding others back. Was Suzuki’s work being scrutinized in a way that the work of American-born translators was not? If she were an older white man with a PhD in Japanese Studies, might her rights request have been met with greater welcome? Suzuki’s ability to look beyond her personal experiences to the myriad of forces that shape them is one of her great assets as a writer.
Fortunately for readers, Hanging Loose honored their commitment to publish the portion of Suzuki’s manuscript that remained available—the right side of each page. This meant Suzuki had to “divorce the two sides and reimagine the entire project,” she related to me last January, via email. I was drawn to her choice of word, “divorce.” Suzuki both complicated and clarified the word for me: “a divorce doesn’t necessarily mean bad things,” she wrote. “It can symbolize liberation; a new beginning; standing on one’s own.”
The result of Suzuki’s remarkable revision—in which the submerged presence of a translated text is significant but undetectable—comes out December 1. Despite, or perhaps because of the necessary severing, the book’s thematic, imagistic, and linguistic connections are extremely robust. If anything has changed, emotionally, in the revision, the moments of melancholia that I remember from Suzuki’s thesis have evolved into the higher-hanging, more nourishing fruits of precision and magnanimity. But it still amazes me to think that such a personal, unified collection came out of a dialogue with another author’s self-contained autofictions. As Suzuki’s book approaches its launch, she continues to interrogate her own experience and the experiences of other translators of color, with an eye toward recognizing and potentially reshaping prejudicial practices in the literary translation corner of the publishing industry.
If When My Mother Is Most Beautiful is read, discussed, and acknowledged—as it very much deserves to be—perhaps Suzuki will be seen less as an emerging voice and more as an authoritative one, and we will see her translations in publication as well. Regardless, this gorgeous collection, permeated with paradigm-shifting multilingualism and bookended by lunar musings, shines and illuminates, even without its translated counterpart. While its pages no longer mirror back another author’s words and experiences, they fully reflect Suzuki—her themes, her voices, the subjects she’s committed to, and her Language. Along with her mother, sister, and ancestors, the writer-translator is fully visible.
Jay Boss Rubin is a writer and translator from Portland, Oregon. His translations from Swahili have been published by Two Lines Press, The Hopkins Review and Northwest Review. His translation of the Swahili novel Rosa Mistika by Euphrase Kezilahabi will be published in Spring 2025 by Yale University Press, as part of the Margellos World Republic of Letters series. Jay is a proud graduate of the Queens College, City University of New York’s MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation.
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